Marion Yorck von Wartenburg

Marion Gräfin Yorck von Wartenburg ( Winter; 14 June 1904 – 13 April 2007) was a German activist, lawyer, jurist, judge and author. She was a resistance fighter against the Nazis and member of the Kreisau Circle.

Biography Marion Winter was born in Berlin, the third of six children of a civil servant who had charge of the administration of the national theatres. She was educated at the Grunewald-Gymnasium in Berlin (now the Walther-Rathenau-Oberschule). A fellow student was future theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. She studied jurisprudence and earned her Juris Doctor in 1929. She completed a doctorate and began to train as an assistant judge that year.

In 1930, she married Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, a cousin of Claus von Stauffenberg. Yorck, also a lawyer, was a descendant of the Prussian field marshal whose defiance of Napoleon had freed his country from the French yoke. Together with her husband, Marion was active with the Kreisau Circle, an opposition group against the National Socialist regime, in 1933.

After her husband's death she was a lifelong living partner of Ulrich Biel, a CDU politician who died in 1996. They lived together for some 50 years. She died in Berlin in 2007, aged 102. She had no children.